CFP: Women Writers and Visual Culture (UK) (11/4/06; 1/12/07)

Over the past few years, there have been significant and ground-breaking attempts to assess the visual strategies that have shaped the political, social, and literary designs of women poets, novelists, illustrators, translators, dramatists, artists and actresses, to give just a few examples. Studies have drawn upon a wide range of media including painting, print, textiles, advertising, architecture, sculpture, stage, screen, cyberspace and beyond.

'Women Writers and Visual Culture' is a one day interdisciplinary conference to be held at Oxford University, bringing together some of these discussions, with particular reference to women who have transgressed boundaries and explored the space between images and text. We are particularly interested in spotlighting the female artist/author, but would also welcome papers assessing the changing representation of women through visual media .The kinds of questions we would like to address include :

How do women interrogate cultural, social, political and theoretical ways of seeing? How have the developments of various visual technologies impacted on the imagination and imaging of women? How do women use images as a tool of both self-projection and self-reflection? How do women transgress boundaries and step outside the frame?

Topics might include:

Women on stageWomen on screenWomen on canvasWomen in the public eyeWomen as cultural or political iconsWomen and popular cultureWomen and the technological apparatus of the visualWomen and the image of the selfWomen and image/text relationshipsWomen and image/sound/sense relationshipsWomen and AestheticsWomen and the science of the eye/opticsWomen and the history of the female observer

Please email abstracts of no more than 250 words to claire.smith_at_linacre.ox.ac.uk by November 4th. More details can be found on the conference website: